Wednesday, July 23, 2008

In his frequently-amusing "Below The Beltway" essay in The Washington Post magazine last week, Gene Weingarten pointed out that Q-Tips boxes have pictures of women using the product near their eye and babies being swabbed on the side of the nose. He notes that the box warns you not to put it in your ear canal, and points out that this is precisely the way that most people use this product. For me, that's pretty much exclusively the way I use them. He suggested that they just come clean and use a "stick it in your ear" marketing slogan.

This led to a brief discussion. Are there any other products out there that are mostly used for exactly the reason the manufacturer tells you not to? Would a package of clothespins show them being used to keep bags of chips closed, as a money clip, or suggesting that they're excellent for, um, "consenting adult playtime", but warn you that under no circumstances whatsoever should you hang your wet clothes with them?

It's like those vibrator packages that have pictures of women massaging their necks with the things.

8 comments:

Not exactly what you're looking for, but how many times have you seen people standing on the top of the ladder to reach their target, despite five pounds and sixteen linear feet of warning stickers telling them not to stand any higher than the third step from the top?

You know, being a Y-chromosome enhanced person, I've never seen a single episode of Sex & The City. I've tried to watch it. I've wanted to be in on the phenomenon. Just doesn't do it for me. Glad I've got the same ideas as some top TV writers, though.

I remember once my father saw a commercial on t.v. (a co-worker's daughter starred in it) for some reason I think it was for the soap, Irish Spring. In the ad, a person was cutting the soap with a paring knife, cutting towards themselves, and my father contacted the company and pointed out that people didn't use a knife in that direction for obvious reasons. They reshot it.

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I was raised in the south starting around the middle of the last century. I am of (at least) Scottish, Irish, English and Cherokee descent. I have been told in the past that I resemble, variously, George Harrison, Alice Cooper, B.J. Thomas, and some unknown person named Bart Cohen, but now I'm just an old guy with too much hair that's well on its way to being gray. I might style myself as a curmudgeon had that term not developed certain favorable connotations which I do not feel I possess. I am quick to aggravation, but slow to out-and-out anger. My hope is that this forum will allow me to vent a little so that I don't seem like a chronic complainer to my friends.